We are happy to announce two talks by Melissa Jeckel (Frankfurt) and Nelly Kerezova (Frankfurt) in the Syntax Colloquium.

The talk will take place on campus in IG 4.301.

Titles: Towards a unifying analysis for (varieties of) the Person-Case-Constraint (Melissa Jeckel)
            Factors for null object resolution in European Portuguese. (Nelly Kerezova)

Date: July 04

Time: 4 pm – 6 pm ct

Abstract:
Jeckel: Towards a unifying analysis for (varieties of) the Person-Case-Constraint

In this talk I present the mechanics and typology of the Person-Case-Constraint (PCC). The PCC is a phenomenon that occurs in many languages that are genetically unrelated, for instance Spanish, Classic Arabic, Shambala, Maltese, Basque, Greek, Southern Tiwa and many more. The restriction of the PCC is given in (1) and illustrated in (2).

(1) (Strong) PCC (Bonet, 1991: 182)
In a combination of a phonologically weak direct and indirect object, the direct object has to be third person.

(2) Je le/*te lui ai présenté.
    I  3.SG.ACC/*2.SG.ACC 3.SG.DAT have introduced
    ‘I introduced him /*you to her.’ (Béjar & Rezac, 2003: 49)

During the last twenty years, a lot of research has been conducted on the PCC in various languages of the world. It has been observed that PCC effects occur in certain constructions like clitic double object constructions or dative-nominative constructions. Moreover, it has been argued in the literature that certain languages allow for violations of the PCC, while others are even more restrictive, leading to different versions of the PCC, i.e. weak PCC, ultra-strong PCC, super-strong PCC, me-first PCC.

The question that then arises is what a syntactic analysis could look like that can explain and account for (all) the different types of the PCC. As an example, I present the analysis by Béjar & Řezáč (2003), according to which Person Agreement is restricted by the Person Licensing Condition (PLC). If the PLC is not obtained, PCC effects occur. However, this analysis is only capable to account for a subset of the different PCC types, but not all of them. The goal of the thesis is thus to investigate how a syntactic analysis should be constructed in order to account for all PCC types.

References
Anagnostopoulou, Elena. (2017). The Person Case Constraint. In M. Everaert and H. C. van Riemsdijk (eds.),  The Wiley Blackwell Companion to Syntax, 2nd edition, 1-47, New Jersey: John Wiley & Sons, Inc.
Béjar, Susana & Milan Řezáč . (2003). Person licensing and the derivation of PCC effects. In A.Perez-Leroux and Y. Roberge (eds.), Romance linguistics: Theory and  acquisition, , 49–62, Amsterdam: John Benjamins.
Bonet, Eulàlia. (1991). Morphology after syntax: Pronominal clitics in Romance. Doctoral dissertation, MIT.
Bonet, Eulàlia. (1994). The Person-Case Constraint: A morphological approach. In MIT Working Papers in Linguistics 22: The morphology-syntax connection, ed. Heidi Harley and Colin Phillips, 33–52. Cambridge, MA: MITWPL.
Klamer, Marian. (1997). Spelling out clitics in Kambera. Linguistics 35, 895–927.
Nevins, Andrew. (2007). The Representation of Third Person and Its Consequences for Person-Case Effects. Natural Language and Linguistic Theory, 25, 273–313.

Kerezova: Factors for null object resolution in European Portuguese
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